The train for Marmion left Boston at four o'clock in the afternoon, and rambled fitfully toward the southern cape, while the shadows grew long in the stony pastures and the slanting light gilded the straggling, shabby woods, and painted the ponds and marshes with yellow gleams. The ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the country Basil Ransom traversed that seemed susceptible of maturity; nothing but the apples in the little tough, dense orchards, which gave a suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright golden-rod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. There were no fields of yellow grain; only here and there a crop of brown hay. But there was a kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly blue.
This snippet is cut from a section describing the arrival of Basil Ransom, a Mississippian Civil War veteran, at a small Cape Cod town where he's gone to woo Verena Tarrant, a young woman who, besides being beautiful, has a gift for oratory. Ransom's distant cousin, Olive Chancellor, a stern and affluent suffragette, has taken Verena under her wing to refine and ultimately use Verena's gift to further her cause. Both cousins see in Verena a means to accomplish their own goals in life, and in that they are completely similar, even if their purposes are diametrically opposed; Olive wants Verena to never marry; Ransom wants Verena to be his wife; and each views the success of the other as the ultimate destruction of the most beautiful thing in the world.
There are a whole host of other characters, each described to the fullest detail, though James spends most of his energy on the Bostonians (Verena and Olive) and Ransom, especially with respect to the psychological portraits of each. He doesn't ever seem to take sides, preferring rather to give the fullest picture possible of each of them in turn, although he will, at times, make light fun of some of the convictions that Olive and Ransom hold. But what is most compelling about the book is the prose, and the ease with which James can swing from past to present, swoop into a character's mind and then skip to another's, and, as in the instance above, provide portraits of landscapes, or, in others, people, towns, cities, movements... portraiture is the idea that seems to come to mind, and whatever he is describing at any given time is front and center, observed with a mind of a man on whom nothing is ever lost.
There is also the rhythmic quality of the prose; it lulls in a way that makes all the detail he's providing seem unimportant, and that it's just the sound, the runs and pauses, that are the point of it all. But it's an artful illusion, and I thought the brief passage above would serve to illustrate that in a small way, but given that it's just a snippet of a much longer paragraph, in a much longer section, it's hard to give an idea of what I'm saying (unless, of course, you've read some James). But even up above, while James is describing the scene from a train, the sentences 'ramble fitfully' forward, giving an image here, another there, stopping to remark on a quality of the scene, and although what is being described is being described quite beautifully, it is clear that the scene is not especially beautiful. The language itself sets the mood, and that, even without any contextualizing detail, such as Basil Ransom's purpose in taking the journey or his dim hope of success, the images, the pace, and words used paint a picture of restlessness, of repressed anticipation. There is the ripeness of summer belied by sour fruition, the bright golden-rod standing tall at the bottom of the stone dykes; images of stymied striving. And despite these morose images, his hope rises up, finds some confirmation in the simplest of pleasures, ending on a note of gross, happy speculation.
The play of consonants is interesting in how they affect the rhythm; the first part of the first sentence is dominated by soft n's, giving way to progression of, in order, s's, t's, d's, and then a mix of all four crescendoing with an ee. The next few sentences are remarkable for their punctuation, the doubled double adjectives for the orchards and the golden-rod; the clipped assonance of grain and hay accomplished with that perfectly placed semi-colon. And the way that last sentence seems to turn on the hinges of "of"--kind of scrubbiness, sweetness of low horizons and mild air, possibility of summer haze and unregarded inlets--and then smooths out for the final stretch. James's sentences demand that you read at their pace, simply because of the way they're constructed, and as you travel with them, even if you don't pay attention to what they're doing, the way they describe seeds underlying impressions that emphasize the action, almost as if you're being infected, slowly, but surely, with a mood.
